“I started to see the links between neuroscience and poetry,” says the Rochester native. “And how the mind works with what's going on around us.”

Here, Cori reads at Poetry & Pie Night in Rochester last summer. Cori's work has been featured in some of the most respected literary journals around, including Denver Quarterly, The American Poetry Journal, and Atlas Review. After Cori graduated from Oberlin in 2004, she went on to Cornell University, where she completed her MFA in Poetry in early 2008. She stayed on at Cornell for two more years to teach undergraduate writing.

While there, Cori proposed a topic inspired by her interest in the intersection between art and science. She call it Literature in the Lab.

“You can pitch your own original section of a writing seminar, and they accepted it,” she says.

“It came about because of the types of students I was getting in my classes. People in other fields—in research and science—also need to be able to communicate successfully to others. I wanted it to be useful to them.”

When Cori later joined SUNY Geneseo's English department as Visiting Assistant Professor, she brought the concept with her. And the subject has blossomed.

“I'm pitching next year for it to become a 200- or 300-level Medical Humanities course,” she says. “I'm working to adapt it into a full-blown, cross-disciplinary course between biology and literature.”

The campus isn't the only place where Cori sees the emergence of new ways to view poetry. Since returning to the Rochester area, she's noticed glimmers of a poetry scene full of fresh voices—and audiences.

“It's growing,” she says. “I'm seeing smaller gatherings of different types of people. Places that are less expected environments for poetry readings, like a loft or a backyard. That makes it more accessible to a different kind of audience in Rochester.”

“I did a big batch in January, and I just wrote my first piece since then,” she says.

She also likes to take her time.

“I tend to write a trillion drafts,” she says, meaning roughly 20. “There's an initial burst, and then I return to it. It could be something I jot down someplace.”

And she saves everything.

“I'm such a slow writer, that nothing ever really gets scrapped. I never throw anything away.”

Her poems are inspired by imagery that comes up in the midst of research and random finds. “Things that happen in the moment,” she says.

“Image is how I find my way in,” she adds. “I never start a poem unless I have a first image that I want to write about, and that gets me excited.”

And her poetry reciprocates, with richly visual language. It's a written equivalent to tapestries, anatomical renderings, and haunted hay rides.

Expect that vivid adventure when you pick up her first book, whose working title is This Coalition of Bones, coming in Winter 2014 from Kore Press. It's divided into sections, each with a loose theme. Memory. Suburbia. And, of course, science.

“I'm obsessed with the beautiful freak,” Cori says. “Those elements of the universe that aren't often seen as beautiful.”

If you're in the Rochester, N.Y., area, you can hear Cori read in person at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 11, at The Yards, 50 Public Market. She and two other poets will share their work as part of the Deep Fried Poetry Series, presented by The Bakery, an online literary magazine. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free.

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Here's a taste of Cori's work, originally published in Blackbird journal in 2010.

Instructions for Dematerializingfor the disinterment of Harry Houdini

1Feet Locked in Stocksbut your departedwife has been cautiously levitatingnested escapeboxes out from each other, one at a time: sleight ofmatryoshka hand

: : :

You became the dreamt trapeze husband, the properly appliedforce of a shoestring. O handcuffedsecret, our unrevealer, how many locks you’ve left for us to pop open to find

2Suspended in Midair from Anklesthe mind refuses to exhume your illusion, containers of glass-and-steel: the body liftedright out of the body; earth left open as an eye socket after the coffin is pulled

: : :

Tell us—will your bones be laced, lined with arsenic and the old deep-believings of séanced revenge? will we uncover fistfuls of sleeping-dirt, the incessant chill of wanting left wanting—answers within answers within